1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical anastomosis apparatus, and more particularly, to a medical anastomosis apparatus capable of radially sewing an overlapping part in a state in which a blood vessel overlaps another blood vessel, a blood vessel overlaps an artificial blood vessel, an organ overlaps another organ or an organ overlaps a blood vessel.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Arterial obstructive diseases, which develop by narrowing and occlusion of blood vessels, increase every year due to lack of exercise and westernized diets.
In particular, representative examples of heart diseases generally include myocardial infarction and angina pectoris, both of which are caused by ischemia in which blood vessels through which nutrition and oxygen are supplied to the heart are occluded.
A surgical operation is often used to treat an occlusive blood vessel or a substantially occluded blood vessel. Such a surgical operation includes end-to-end anastomosis which includes incising an affected part of a blood vessel and anastomosing the incised blood vessel. In this case, when a long portion of the blood vessel is incised, or a long blood vessel is required to bypass the affected part of the blood vessel, a vein in the leg is generally incised and used.
A section of blood vessels is mainly composed of intima, media and adventitia. When two blood vessels are anastomosed, it is necessary to anastomose the blood vessels in a state in which one intima is closely attached to the other intima.
However, upon the anastomotic operation of the incised blood vessel as well as the treatment of such arterial obstructive diseases of the heart, a medical specialist in microsurgeries directly secures the vision for surgery under a microscope or a high-powered magnifying glass, and then manually stitches the incised blood vessels using a stitching fiber. Therefore, this stitch surgery has problems in that it should be performed by a highly skilled medical specialist, and also requires a great deal of time and effort.
In particular, it is very difficult to stitch anastomose blood vessels one by one in organs (for example, the heart) which pulse continuously and regularly. Therefore, it is necessary to artificially induce paralysis of the heart and stop the heartbeat for at least 3 hours during heart surgery.
Therefore, a variety of anastomosis apparatuses have been designed to avoid manually stitching blood vessels one by one using such stitching fiber. Among these, apparatuses capable of easily anastomosing blood vessels in an end-to-end manner are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,774,615, 4,214,586 and 4,917,087, and a microvascular anastomotic coupler is, for example, commercially available from Synovis Micro Companies Alliance (US).
U.S. Pat. No. 3,774,615 discloses an apparatus for anastomosing cut blood vessels without surgery. However, the apparatus has problems in that the blood vessels are not completely anchored in a site in which the blood vessels are anastomosed, it is difficult to evenly attach the peripheries of two cut blood vessels, and a contact region between the cut blood vessels is very small in area, which leads to poor anastomosis and blood leakage.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,214,586 proposes an apparatus which is similar to that of U.S. Pat. No. 3,774,615 in basic principle. Here, the apparatus is configured to securely anchor end portions of the cut blood vessels. However, the apparatus has a problem in that, since a contact region between the cut blood vessels is small in area, it is difficult to anastomose the blood vessels.
Meanwhile, the above-described stitching technique includes a method of stitching blood vessels using a stapling device that uses a surgical staple. Such a method has been used for gastrointestinal resection and anastomosis, lung resection, bronchorrhaphy and skin closure.
However, the stapling device is generally a linear staple that is widely used for longitudinal resection and stitching.
Accordingly, the conventional stapling device may not easily apply to anastomosis between circular blood vessels and blood vessels, or blood vessels and artificial blood vessels.
Furthermore, the conventional stapling device has difficulties in anastomosing blood vessels with an organ, for example, the gastrointestinal tract, the lungs or the bronchus, or anastomosing an organ with another organ.